Category: Semafor

Britain’s universities are firing staff, cutting courses, and curtailing research over an intensifying financial shortfall. Prior changes to the country’s higher education system expanded access while reducing government support, increasing institutions’ reliance on fees — particularly from international students — to generate revenue. Successive governments have, however, sought to curb ...

Physicists put a single chunk of metal into two places at once, the largest object ever shown to obey quantum mechanics’ weirdest rule. At atomic scales, matter behaves like both wave and particle, meaning an electron, say, is not in one location but is smeared across space in a probabilistic ...

Japan is bolstering ties with the Philippines as regional tensions grow over Chinese military activity. The countries’ leaders formally elevated their relationship and agreed to start talks on a military intelligence sharing agreement. Manila could be the first major customer for Japanese weapons since Tokyo scrapped an exports ban in ...

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang is set to join the advisory board of an elite Chinese university, which counts Tim Cook, Elon Musk, and Mark Zuckerberg among its 65 members, the Financial Times reported. The board at the Tsinghua University School of Economics and Management, which also includes the heads of ...

Cutesy toys are going gangbusters among Japanese adults. Some 1,400 capsule toy stores, which sell trinkets dispensed from coin-operated machines, now exist in Japan, with many taking over retail space deserted during the pandemic. The popularity of the toys, known as comes as Japan’s population rapidly ages — the number ...

Anthropic on Thursday announced a new funding round valuing it at $965 billion, surpassing rival OpenAI as the world’s most valuable AI startup. The financing caps off a busy several months for the Claude maker, which has rolled out new coding and finance tools aimed at helping businesses be more ...

Companies are second-guessing their aggressive spending on AI, as the tech weighs on margins. AI has been pitched partly as an avenue for businesses to save money because of increased productivity — but corporations are now facing ballooning IT costs. Uber blew through its entire 2026 AI budget in four ...

More than 1,000 Bahraini citizens have sent messages of support to King Hamad bin Isa Al-Khalifa in recent weeks, praising a clampdown on those accused of being sympathetic to Iran. In what appears to be a well-coordinated campaign, the first cables were sent in early May, soon after the king ...

Abdullah bin Hamad Al Attiyah, the architect of Qatar’s LNG industry that transformed the country from a declining oil producer into one of the world’s wealthiest nations, died in London on Wednesday. The former energy minister was born in 1953, nearly two decades before Qatar’s independence. He grew up in ...

Saudi Arabia’s $1.5 billion pledge this month to help Syrians return from refugee camps is a major boost to the government in Damascus, which is working to consolidate power and restart the economy after more than a decade of war. The package — tied to housing, infrastructure, utilities, and small ...